


It Had To Be You

by TheSigyn



Category: Torchwood
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-05
Updated: 2011-01-05
Packaged: 2018-04-14 22:41:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 7
Words: 12,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4582848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSigyn/pseuds/TheSigyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the events of Children of Earth, Captain Jack runs to the only person who can help him; Captain John Hart. But this is not how John wanted it to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Captain John Hart was running. Sometimes he thought all his life had been on the run. Running from his family as a boy, running from the Time Agency as a man, running from the authorities as life got weirder and weirder. And this guy they had after him now — Jeez! John ducked behind a crate and tried to control his breathing.   
  
It wasn’t fair. It was like he didn’t know how to run anymore. These six months, John had gotten used to being the phantom. These twenty-first century police were completely useless! Simple DNA testing as the strongest tool in their identification arsenal? And they needed a full cell to do it, too, and it was expensive, and they usually didn’t bother. It was so damned easy! It felt like having a free pass to do anything he wanted.   
  
Until this new guy got after him. John hadn’t caught a glimpse of him yet. But he’d been tracked. Followed. Shot at. Trapped a few times. It was like he was being tailed by his own shadow.   
  
John was stuck, now, in a warehouse — it was always bloody warehouses, wasn’t it?— and completely lost. He would have given anything to turn on his wrist strap, but he’d had to deactivate it. He’d realized the first day that his pursuer was using it somehow to track him. He knew there were government agencies up to the challenge — he was probably being pursued by UNIT. Or that wretched Smith and Jones husband and wife team that wouldn’t leave him alone. He’d finally escaped them two months ago, and he seemed to have fallen off their radar, but this new guy — he was deadly.   
  
John held his breath as he heard footsteps — footsteps — slowly pacing down the aisle toward him. Shit! John looked to either side. There was no cover other than the crate he was behind. The lower shelves were all filled with empty and half empty pallets, nothing tall enough to conceal him. He couldn’t creep away. Nothing for it, then. John eased out his gun and readied it. He’d been trying to avoid killing people — not for any moral reasons. It was just too much trouble, and tended to get the rest of the authorities after him. And no matter what anyone said, it was easier to escape from one guy than two hundred, even if the one guy did know what John was and everyone else thought him just your average, every day murderer.   
  
The footsteps were closer, now. This guy definitely knew John was there. John took a few deep breaths and rearranged himself. This was it. Hopefully he could be out of the area before anyone connected him to the killing.   
  
He surged upright from his hiding place and took a shot at the figure in the blue coat that was following him.   
  
He had been closer than John knew. Jack twisted the gun up and the bullet impacted on the ceiling while he brought his own gun to John’s temple. “Nice to see you, too,” he spat.   
  
  
***  
  
  
“I didn’t do it. I was provoked,” John said, his smile snapping on like a light.   
  
“Provoked into what, if you didn’t do it?” Jack asked.   
  
“Nothing,” John said. His adrenaline was racing at the feel of Jack’s gun to his temple. He twisted his gaze into something hungry and said, “Finally come to finish the job?” He turned his head until the muzzle of the gun was tucked by his lip, almost kissing the weapon. He was panting, and he wasn’t sure why. Jack could always do that to him. But then so could fear of death or the prospect of a really good drug. Jack was sex and death and adrenaline and everything else a man could want. “Or do you only mean to arrest me?”   
  
Jack leaned in close to him, and his face was angry. “I’ve been looking for you,” he spat, and pulled the gun away.   
  
John still held his own weapon in his hand. He held it casually, but ready, if Jack tried anything. “Well, you found me, love. You could have just called.”  
  
“You turned off your strap,” Jack snapped.   
  
John looked down. “Yeah, well, there was this guy after me. And not in a good way.”   
  
Jack glared at him. “Starting three weeks ago?” he asked.   
  
John frowned. “Yeah.”   
  
“That was me,” he said.   
  
That did surprise John. “You could have said,” he said. “Before I turned this off.”   
  
“I just needed to see you,” Jack said darkly. “I didn’t feel like talking.”   
  
John turned the strap back on, and finally felt whole again. It had felt like being half blind underwater without it. Wireless communications, weather patterns, his own life readings, everything was again at his fingertips. Hart’s Heart, as he’d taken to calling it. “Why’d you shoot at me?”   
  
“I was losing patience!” Jack snapped. “I was only trying to wing you.”   
  
That boded well. John relaxed his grip on the gun, just a bit. “Well, what did you want from me, love? Finally ready to blow this place with me — or just blow me?”   
  
“Shut the fuck up,” Jack said.   
  
John was taken aback. Jack sounded deadly serious. What happened to their banter? What happened to the suggestion and innuendo? What happened to —   
  
What the fuck had happened to Jack?   
  
John’s eyes opened wide as he finally looked properly at his erstwhile lover. The last time John had seen him, he had been horrified — Jack’s eyes had turned old overnight, old and sad and tragic. Yes. Two thousand years of torture followed by losing two members of his team, and his brother, had turned Jack’s eyes dark. John had expected that.   
  
But there was something else now in Jack’s face. Something John didn’t like. Something that... damn it, there was something frightening in Jack’s eyes. Something that wasn’t mere sorrow, pain and loss, though all of that was there too. There was hatred, but it didn’t seem to be directed at John. Hatred was never something he had seen in Jack’s eyes before. Not like this.  
  
John pulled off his bravado like he was pulling off a coat. He was very good at it — it was something Jack had used to love about him. John was delightfully two-faced, turning from a callus sociopath to a fluffy bunny all in an hour, entirely at his own whim. “What’s the matter, love?” he asked, and his tone was very gentle.   
  
“Don’t,” Jack said tersely.   
  
“Don’t what?”   
  
“Just don’t,” Jack snapped. He holstered his gun and narrowed his eyes at John.   
  
“All right then, why are you after me?” John said. “If you want me to leave earth, I’m not ready to go yet.” The truth was he was being hunted just about everywhere else by authorities — and outlaws— more efficient than twenty-first century humans, so he was perfectly content to wait his time out here, where he could act with relative impunity.   
  
“I need you,” Jack said.   
  
John scoffed. “What do you need me for? Mission too dangerous or unsavory for your Torchwood friends to soil their pretty paws on? Can’t get someone else?”   
  
“*I* need you,” Jack said, with enough emphasis on the “I” that John knew this was personal. Jack shrugged off his blue coat and laid it on the crate. “It could only be you.”   
  
John’s eyes closed involuntarily and his cock twitched at the words. It was as if Jack had just injected him with a potent and intoxicating drug. He’d been wanting to hear those words out of Jack’s mouth since he’d left him so many years ago, since they both split with the Time Agency and then the inevitable split with each other. Without the mutual hatred of the agency, and their constant official partnering, there had really been very little to keep Jack and John together. It was like two positive currents — they didn’t work without a negative to complete the loop, and the agency had been their negative.  
  
John had frequently wished he’d never let Jack persuade him into leaving the Agency. He wished he’d talked Jack into staying. So they kept missing memories, and Jack had a sneaking suspicion that they were being used for very unsavory purposes during those gaps. Jack and John had always been the ones they called when they wanted the real dirty work done. If some of that dirty work was too dirty to remember, it wasn’t much of a loss. But that was always the difference between them. Jack had a conscience. John did not. In the end, John didn’t care if he was being used to commit temporal genocide or be the instrument through which the Agency decided who lived and who died. Jack felt those memory gaps as affronts to his soul. John had already decided he didn’t have one.   
  
Jack was the one soft spot in John’s hardened leather constitution. Jack could wound him to the core. And because he loved him, Jack was the only one John cared even a little about. It was an entirely selfish love, but it was deep, enduring and very, very real. “I’ve always wanted to hear you say that,” John said. He took a step forward, ready to lean his head onto Jack’s shoulder and open himself for anything and everything. Even torture was pleasure with Jack. He started to slide his gun into its holster.   
  
But Jack stayed his hand. “That’s not why I need you,” he said, keeping the gun between them. Jack’s hand wrapped sensually around his, tucking against the trigger. John wasn’t sure exactly what Jack was planning, and let his hand relax for Jack to take the gun away. Suddenly, to John’s horror, the gun bucked, and Jack fell like a stone. He’d been pointing the gun under his chin.   
  
“Oh, fuck,” John breathed. Jack wasn’t going to forgive him for this one in a hurry. Blood had sprayed the empty pallets, and was pooling on the cement floor. And how the fuck could someone who’s just been killed honestly believe it had been an accident? Jack was really going to hang up on this one. Whatever he had wanted from John, John had honestly and completely torn it up now. And he hadn’t even meant to!   
  
John trembled with horror and indecision as he wondered how long it would take for Jack to come back from the dead, and whether he should be there when he did. He still hadn’t made a decision when Jack took a deep breath and groaned, shaking his head as if — well, as if a bullet had just gone through it. He panted as he sat upright and stared at John. “Thank you,” he said.   



	2. Chapter 2

  
  
Guns. Shot through the heart. Through the lungs. Seventeen different angles of the head.   
  
  
***  
  
“I want you to kill me, John.”   
  
“You’ve got to be kidding me!”   
  
“I need this to go away. There is only one person on the planet, in the universe, in the reaches of time and space I can trust to do this for me. I’ve been searching for you for months. I need you. It can only be you.”   
  
  
***  
  
Blades. Slitting the throat until the blood gurgles down in streams. The wrists, letting everything wash out of him. Stabbed in the heart. Through the sternum. The arterial artery. So much blood over everything.   
  
John drew the line at disemboweling him.  
  
  
***  
  
“You can’t want this.”   
  
“I’ve tried everything. I can’t even drink myself into unconsciousness. Drugs don’t change my brain chemistry — that’s too much of a change. I’m a fixed point in time and space, John. I can’t do anything to change. So I can’t get it out of my head!”   
  
  
***   
  
  
Drowning. Forcing his head in a bucket of water until finally he stops struggling. Pouring the water down his throat and nose until he coughs and sputters and finally goes still. Tossed into a swimming pool with a heavy weight, dragging him down, down, down.   
  
  
***  
  
  
“There’s an emptiness inside me, tearing me down. I can’t forget her face. Just staring at me. Dead to my own daughter. Worse than dead. How can I live with that kind of betrayal? He just stood there, you know. As I murdered him, slowly. How can you force your own grandson into martyrdom? He trusted me. That boy loved me, and I killed him in cold blood.”   
  
  
***   
  
Electricity can be fun. Forget jabbing your fingers into wall sockets. Pull the lever and let the entire city electrical feed pour right through you. Car batteries attached directly to your skin with alligator clips. Don’t forget the conductive gel — we need the best conductivity possible.   
  
  
***  
  
“Just forget, Jack! Take the pills and stop this!”  
  
“No! I need to remember him! Ianto Jones. Best coffee in the world. Loyal beyond all sense of the word. There is no describing that depth of devotion. A heart that deep can only be found once in a century — in a millennium! And he was MINE, John! Once I’d touched him he belonged to me, every single atom. Do you understand what that means? To love someone, utterly selflessly? To have someone love you like that, give themselves to you, wholeheartedly, every breath in their body, every heartbeat, their body, their heart, their soul. He had given me his soul, John! And I let him DIE! I couldn’t protect him, and I let him die! I’m not allowed to forget him! I’d be killing him all over again!”   
  
“Don’t cry, Jack.”   
  
“Just kill me. Please. Just kill me.”   
  
  
***   
  
Strangulation. A noose. Piano wire. Oh, yes, hang me with a silken tie. There has to be more. Go to suffocation. Pillows. A faulty gasmask. “Are you my mummy?”   
  
It had to be a joke John wasn’t privy to. A sad one, because Jack was crying instead of laughing.   
  
  
***  
  
  
“Grey. Suzie. Owen. Tosh. Ianto. Stephen. It’s all me. I killed every one of them, I might as well have buried the knife in their chests. I’m a monster worse than the Master — at least he had the pleasure and the excuse of madness. But madness is too much change. I don’t even deserve madness.   
  
“And it’s forever! I’ll be doing this FOR FUCKING EVER! Everything I touch dies! Everyone I love burns for me. And it’ll go on and on and on and on until the end of the fucking universe! I’ve seen it, you know. The blackness. As the stars wink out one by one and all I’ll have left is the burning remains of Utopia and a madman who knows all about me. How will that paradox work out? And then nothing. Nothing and nothing and nothing forever. It’s not fair. It’s not fair! Kill me John. I want to die.   
  
“I JUST WANT TO DIE!”   
  
  
***  
  
  
“Hey, look, is this Gwen Cooper?” said the voice on the other line.   
  
“Williams,” Gwen said, annoyed. Everyone knew she was married, didn’t they? And she didn’t like the voice on the phone. The number was unlisted, which didn’t help. She didn’t trust anyone anymore. “Who is this?”   
  
“What the fuck happened to Jack?” said the voice without preamble.   
  
“Jack? Do you know where he is? Who is this?”   
  
“John Hart. Now tell me what happened to Jack.”   
  
“It’s a long story. Do you know where Jack is?”   
  
“Yeah, he’s with me.”   
  
“Is he all right?”   
  
“That’s a matter of opinion. Hang on.” There was a loud pop on the phone as if something had dropped, or a firecracker had gone off. “Now tell me what exactly happened — I can’t get anything clear out of him. It’s all just raving and self-accusation.”   
  
Gwen wasn’t sure she wanted to tell. It was hard to hold back. This was the first news of Jack she’d had in five months. “Were you on Earth when all the kids started chanting?”   
  
“Yeah.” The story was told quickly, in very brief sentences. Twice John asked Gwen to hang on, and another of those loud pops sounded over the phone.   
  
“There has got to be something. Someone. Someone on this benighted planet who could say something to comfort him,” John said. “Because I’m trying, but I’m not having much luck.” John sounded a little annoyed. “He doesn’t want comfort from me.”   
  
“Where are you?”  
  
“He doesn’t want it from you, either,” John said. “I asked. He burst into tears. He can’t look at you. He says he can’t even think about you without it hurting.”  
  
Gwen cringed. Rhys looked over at her and then touched her gently bulging stomach. Something wrong with the baby? Gwen shook her head at him, and then turned her attention back to John. “I think there’s only one person in the universe who can help him,” Gwen said. “He needs a Doctor.”   
  
“Well, tell me how to find this Doctor!” John snapped. “Because I’m losing it!”   
  
“If you’re losing patience, send him back to me,” Gwen said.   
  
“I’m not losing patience,” John said. “I’m losing my sanity. Hang on.”   
  
Another of those pops.  
  
“I didn’t know you had any sanity to lose.”   
  
“Neither did I,” John said. There was a muffled moan from beyond John’s line. “Damn it.” Another pop. “There.”   
  
“What’s that sound? What are you doing?”   
  
“Shooting. Him. In the head,” John said in a clipped tone. “He begs me to. He screams if I stop.”   
  
Gwen couldn’t stop herself from making a sound as if she, too, had been shot.   
  
“Tell me there’s someone besides me he’d be willing to talk to!”   
  
Gwen gasped with emotion and finally gave John a phone number. It was all she could think of. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Yes, I know Jack should know this number from Journey's End, but for the purposes of this story, he's forgotten or lost it, or for some reason the Doctor changed it.)

After shooting him for most of the day John offered to kill him by drowning him in the bath. Jack awoke, still damp, and nude, but clean and warm on John’s bed. He felt a warm weight on his chest and tried to sit up to see what John was up to this time — and found his hands tied to the bedstead. He pulled and grunted, but they held fast.   
  
“You think I don’t know how to tie a body?” John said quietly from Jack’s chest.   
  
Jack looked down and saw only the top of John’s head.   
  
“You know you’re better than rehab?” John said. “You’ve ruined me. I’ll never be able to kill anyone again without hearing you screaming. Begging. Thanking me.” He shook his head. “I think I’ve lost my taste for killing.” He looked up at Jack, and Jack could see his eyes were hooded with exhaustion. Jack didn’t know how long John had been up, but come to think of it, he hadn’t let him sleep. It had been two days, at least. Every time he came back to life he just begged for another few moments of mind-blocking pain and blissful oblivion. John shook his head in disgust. “You’ve done the most heinous thing ever, Jack. You’ve gone and made me a better man. I hope you can live with yourself.”   
  
Jack closed his eyes and tilted his head back. “I’m sorry, John.”   
  
“Don’t bother,” John said. “You’ve done enough of that.” John nuzzled his head into Jack’s chest. To Jack’s surprise, he felt moisture on his skin. “I feel like I’ve died a thousand times. I never knew how much I loved you until now,” John said quietly. He looked back up at Jack and his eyes were moist. “And I know you hate me.”  
  
“I hate everything,” Jack said, hopelessly.   
  
John stared up at him. The tears in his shining eyes were strange to Jack. Jack knew he was a complete sociopath, unable to feel shame or guilt, but Jack remembered that didn’t make him inhuman. John was crying for himself — John could never cry for others. Even if he seemed to be, it was only because he loved them, and the pain they were feeling hurt him, but it wasn’t any kind of sympathetic compassion — but he was so hard that even that was rare. John bit his lip. “I want to fuck you so bad it hurts,” he whispered.   
  
Jack felt no response. He didn’t want John. All he wanted was death.   
  
“I could rape you,” John said, almost casually. “You’re in no position to stop me.”   
  
“Do whatever you want, John,” Jack said dully. “I don’t care.”   
  
John crept up Jack’s body and kissed him, so sweetly that Jack was surprised. His mouth responded even though the rest of his body did not. He watched John’s response as he finally pulled away. It was only immensely sad. Then, to Jack’s surprise, John reached over and pulled on the leather belt that had strapped Jack’s right hand to the bed. “Stop killing yourself for ten minutes,” John said quietly. “And behave. You have a visitor.”  
  
He got up off the bed and walked out of the bedroom, leaving Jack with approximately thirty seconds to untie his other wrist and make sure he was firmly covered with the blanket. It was wise of John to strip him. For one, what was left of his clothes were blood soaked and ragged — save for the coat, the coat that Ianto had found for him, which Jack had carefully removed and preserved. For another, it left him vulnerable.   
  
Then the door to John’s room opened and one of the last people Jack expected John to bring him walked in the door.   
  
“Hey, Jack.” Martha Jones smiled sadly. “Hear you’re not doing so well.”   
  
  
***  
  
  
Jack cringed and squeezed his temples with his wrists. “What are you doing here?” He didn’t deserve to see Martha. He didn’t deserve to see anyone decent. He was a traitorous monster fit only to be ground up as fertilizer — what the fuck was she doing coming to see him?   
  
Martha sat on the edge of the bed and passed him a new shirt, still in it’s wrapping. It was blue. Jack nearly sobbed. “I’ve brought you some clothes,” Martha said. She lay the rest of an outfit at the foot of the bed and pulled out an otoscope. She shone the light in each of his eyes, and looked into his ears. “Nothing physically wrong, on the surface,” Martha said. She smiled sadly. “But I guess that’s not surprising.”   
  
“How did you find me?”   
  
“I got the strangest phone call about three hours ago,” Martha said. “This renegade we’ve been chasing for months who’s been hacking into banks with technology that is clearly non-terrestrial — or at least way ahead of its time. He’s been killing, raping, pillaging like some futuristic Viking, so Micky and I were trying to catch him and... make him stop.”   
  
Jack raised an eyebrow. Knowing Micky’s new militant streak, John could have been up for some really harsh consequences.   
  
“We lost track of him a few months ago, and we were trying to track down a few of the remaining Adipose offspring that got lost because their carriers weren’t in London. When we got this phone call.”   
  
“John called you?”   
  
Martha nodded. “That man really loves you, you know. He just gave up his freedom for you. Micky’s got him under lock and key now.”   
  
“Don’t let him kiss him,” Jack said.   
  
Martha raised an eyebrow. “That could be interesting to watch,” she said, with a slight blush. “Anyway, I came for you.”   
  
Jack shook his head. “Thanks for the gesture.”   
  
“But it won’t help,” Martha said, and it wasn’t a question.   
  
Jack sighed.   
  
“Killing yourself won’t help, either,” Martha said.   
  
“It can’t hurt,” Jack whispered. “At least I get a few blissful moments of oblivion. I swear, it’s better than a drug. Back when drugs still did anything for me.” He looked up at the ceiling. “One month of heroin bliss. And then suddenly, nothing. Nothing. I adapted. Fixed point in time and space. I adapted to the addiction. I didn’t want the drug. And the drug did nothing. So much for my oblivion.”  
  
“But oblivion isn’t making you feel better, Jack,” Martha said. “That’s not solving the problem.”   
  
“There is no solving this problem,” Jack said. “I would give anything, anything, to commit suicide. For real, just end it, forever. Maybe I could pay for Stephen’s death. Maybe, I don’t believe it, but maybe I’d find Ianto again. Maybe I’d find out I have a soul. Rather than this murderous, empty life, going on and on and on and on and on and on and—!”  
  
“Jack!” Martha touched his bare shoulder and made him stop.   
  
Jack took a deep breath. “The thing I can’t stomach is that it’s FOREVER,” he groaned. “I’ll be like this forever and forever and forever until the end of the universe, and there I’ll be, floating with the microwaves in that blackness.”   
  
“You don’t know if that’s true,” Martha said.   
  
“Fixed point in time and space,” Jack said. “I can’t die. I can’t even change. I’ve tried to change my brain chemistry and tried to disintegrate my DNA. Drugs do nothing for me. I can’t even drive myself mad, I’ve been trying.” He looked up at her. “It’s forever, Martha. Forever.” He started to cry. “You can’t even begin to contemplate what that means! Forever. All alone, forever.”   
  
“You can’t know that, Jack.”   
  
“I know,” Jack whispered. “I know.”   
  
Martha’s face was grave, and she looked uncertain, but she finally spoke. “I don’t think it’s true. I think there’s something you need to know.”   
  
Jack opened his eyes. Martha looked a bit nervous.   
  
“I probably shouldn’t do this,” Martha said. “You’re not supposed to know too much about your own future. Or so the Doctor told me. He said it’s dangerous. But I’m a doctor myself, and I can’t watch — this.” She gestured at Jack and his black, empty despair. She took a deep breath. “I think the Doctor and I saw you die. Really die.”   
  
Something strange happened in Jack at that moment. A glimmer of light, like an ember blown on in the darkness. “When?” Jack asked with the innocence of a child.   
  
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Martha said. “If it was you, you were a couple of billion years old.”   
  
To Jack’s surprise, the light didn’t immediately snuff itself out. It glowed, steady and strong, a hope too distant to touch, but not too far to see. Billions was a long time, but it wasn’t FOREVER. “If it was me?” Jack asked.   
  
“Well, if it was you, you’d evolved a lot,” Martha said. “He was a creature almost entirely of cerebrum, with eyes that...” she shook her head. “Like staring into the vortex itself. Ancient and ageless at once. I was terrified when I saw him, but the Doctor told me it was all right. And it was all right. He simply radiated wisdom. The peace he exuded was like a drug. In all my travels around the universe, I never saw a more amazing being. I don’t think the Doctor had, either.”  
  
Martha’s voice was distant and peaceful, as if she was describing a religious experience. “I still see those eyes in my dreams, sometimes. Hear his voice — but it wasn’t a voice. It was some kind of sympathetic telepathy, as if everything in my being knew what was being said. When he died — it was the only death I’ve ever seen that felt RIGHT, wholly and completely right. There was no pain. No regret. Nothing left undone. It was beautiful.”   
  
Jack swallowed. He prayed, with all his being, that it was him. “How did it happen?”  
  
“Saving a world,” Martha said with a smile. “I won’t say too much, just in case. But it was noble and right. And he wasn’t alone. There was me, and the Doctor by his side. And some gorgeous cat lady who had apparently been devoted to him for the last thirty some years.”   
  
Jack smiled. “Gorgeous cat lady, huh?”   
  
Martha laughed. THAT had sounded like the old Jack. “Yeah,” she said. “She was getting on in years, but she was still gorgeous.”   
  
Jack chuckled. Something was softening inside him. Something was taking on the blackness and turning it from an infinity of eternity to a long tunnel, a journey, but one that might well have an ending. “What makes you think it was me?” he asked.   
  
“Well, he knew something,” Martha said. “He warned the Doctor. He said — he told the Doctor, ‘You are not alone.’ When we got to the end of the universe and we met professor Yana... that was what warned the Doctor about the Master. It was why we got there fast enough to lock the TARDIS controls.”   
  
Jack sighed. That was pretty flimsy evidence, if that creature had been as wise and ancient as Martha said.   
  
“And then there was the name,” Martha said.   
  
Jack looked up at her. “What was it?”  
  
Martha smiled. “He was called the Face of Boe.”   
  
Jack blinked. He remembered his days as the only celebrity on the Boeshane Peninsula, as everyone cheered him, banners above his head touting him as The Face of Boe. Then something glimmered in his memory. It was an old memory, now, more than a lifetime old, two thousand years old, as far back as when he was still mortal, still normal, still himself. Back, way way back, on Games Station. After Jack had died the first time, and Rose Tyler had brought him back to life. It had taken Jack some enterprising months to get his wrist strap working adequately enough to take him back to Earth — the time jump function supposedly nothing more than a safety back up, as far as the Time Agency was concerned. It was dangerous and somewhat unstable, and they preferred their capsules. It had been on the blink since Jack had left the Agency, and he didn’t use it if he could help it. And sure enough, it had burnt out after he’d gotten to Earth in the 1800's.   
  
But while the satellite’s cannibalized computers were plotting the calculations to return him to Earth, Jack had been alone and restless on an empty space station filled with nothing more than dalek dust. The games were dead, thank the heavens, so Jack had accessed the archives for something to do. Games Station had once been Satellite Five, and an interstellar news collections site. There had been a great deal of history that he absorbed while he had the time. And some trivia. And it was there Jack had encountered record of the Face of Boe himself.   
  
He’d thought the name was funny, and had looked the creature up. Nothing was known about him. His origin was apparently a different galaxy, but no one was sure about that either. His age was unknown. His actual gender was unknown, though he went by a masculine appellation. And when Jack had seen his image, he had chuckled. The creature was ancient and unknowable, but so serene. Jack had actually stared at it for some minutes before he’d shaken himself out of his reflection and gone on to research something else. But the face had stayed with him. And Martha was right about the eyes.   
  
If that was Jack’s end... it might not be so bad. Whatever that creature was, he certainly had a handle on his being.   
  
“What did the Doctor think?” he asked.   
  
Martha took a deep breath. “Ask him yourself,” she said. She handed Jack a phone with a number on speed-dial already cued up. She smiled gently. “He’s expecting your call.”   
  
Jack stared at the phone. Martha had no idea what an experience this was. For someone who had waited over a century to track the Doctor down, stopped at every turn, thwarted by ill luck and the old Torchwood and a thousand different troubles, to be handed his bleeding phone number was like being given a direct link to God. Jack’s hand trembled, but he handed the phone back. “No thank you,” he whispered.   
  
“What?”   
  
Jack shook his head. “I can’t face him.”   
  
“You don’t have to explain. I already have.”   
  
The Doctor knew EVERYTHING? Jack’s face twisted. “God, just kill me,” he muttered.   
  
“You’ve been doing enough of that,” Martha said.   
  
Jack swallowed. Truth was, he was ruthlessly ashamed of himself. He shook his head slightly.   
  
Martha only looked at him with those big, sad eyes of hers. “He wants to talk to you,” she said. She put the phone back into his hand. And then she walked out of the room.   



	4. Chapter 4

Jack stared at the phone for a minute. He could just put it down. Dress in the clothing that Martha left for him, walk back outside, and find some other way of blocking out the pain. Maybe he could talk John into sealing him back into concrete. When the wretched stuff finally degraded it would have been a few thousand years. Maybe the pain wouldn’t feel so close then.   
  
Fat chance. Two thousand years under the earth hadn’t made him forget all the horrors of before. Why should he think it would work this time?   
  
He didn’t imagine the Doctor could do anything. It wasn’t the kind of problem he solved. He would humiliate himself for nothing.   
  
Finally he put his finger to the button and pressed it. He held it to his ear. The phone picked up on the first ring.   
  
“Hey, Jack.” The Doctor’s voice. For once it was deadly serious.   
  
“Where the fuck were you?” Jack hadn’t realized he was going to ask that question.   
  
Martha had obviously brought the Doctor up to speed, because he didn’t ask what Jack meant. “When Martha called I was battling a macro-virus on Kakrafoon and about fourteen clicks from the TARDIS,” the Doctor said. “Once I’d missed her call the events were in my timeline and I was helpless.” He took a deep breath. “But that’s an excuse and you know it.”   
  
Jack closed his eyes. “What’s the real reason?”   
  
“Mm.” The Doctor made a musing sound. “I don’t know if you’ll believe me.”   
  
“Doctor,” Jack said. “There’s no one else I’ve ever believed in.”   
  
The Doctor hesitated after that confession. Finally, he spoke. “A long time ago, there used to be Guardians of the universe. They used to get their fingers in my affairs all the time and cause me no end of trouble. Now, since the Time War I haven’t seen or heard anything of them. I don’t know if they still exist. But I realized something as they shifted me about the cosmos. I realized it hundreds of years and more than half a dozen regenerations ago.” Jack could just see the Doctor in his TARDIS, turning to lean against the console. “Sometimes there’s only one way things can be done. Only one person who can fix things. This time, — for whatever reason — it could only be you.”   
  
“I did a wretched job of it,” Jack snapped.   
  
“It’s not pretty,” the Doctor said. “It almost never is. I know. I’ve been there. Does the walker choose the path, or the path the walker? The choice is to be the walker — or let everything die around us.”   
  
“It’s not fair,” Jack whispered.  
  
“No, it isn’t,” the Doctor said. “Do you think I don’t know that?”   
  
“I can’t face it,” Jack said, his teeth clenched in pain. “Every second, it’s just tearing me down. I can’t believe what I’ve done.”  
  
“You’ve saved the children of Earth,” the Doctor said evenly. “I know the creatures you fought. They were an intergalactic drug cartel. Their biological weaponry and viral technology was adapted by the daleks. No one’s sure who came up with it first, the daleks or them. They don’t use language themselves. They’re an interconnected species, and they don’t need it. They consider every species of ‘single minds’ as they call them inferior. Not even cattle, just algae. They live only on sensation. They’d have come back every seven years and demanded a new shipment of children. Those who do not yield to them are slaughtered without mercy. The planets who have capitulated to them in the past have become soulless. Children are commodities, and women — or whatever gender carries the offspring — are treated like cattle. The best planets produce clone children solely to be sacrificed. The worst... it’s hell. I won’t tell you what becomes of their population. I think you can guess from what you’ve seen. The lucky species disperse or die out. Your ‘456' had successfully wiped out half of their own galaxy, and were moving in on yours.”   
  
“And with my luck they’ll be back in less than a decade.”   
  
“No,” the Doctor said. “When I heard I looked. I don’t know whether or not you’ll feel better if you know you’ve committed genocide.”   
  
Jack was silent.   
  
"Did you give them a choice?" the Doctor asked quietly.   
  
"Yes," Jack whispered.  
  
"And what did they do?"   
  
"They killed my lover."  
  
The Doctor made a small sound, and Jack could imagine him nodding. "Then you did what you had to do. You've ended it for good and all, Jack."   
  
“They’re dead? All of them?” Jack wasn't at all sure how he felt about that. As far as he knew, he'd never committed genocide before.   
  
“Every last one of them. I told you. Interconnected species. You killed one shipload. Like a disease, the reaction spread. By now their central population has felt the effects. They should all be dead by now.” He paused. “Like your grandson.”   
  
“You can’t condone what I’ve done,” Jack said. “The ends can’t justify the means. No one can forgive me for this. My own grandson.... Children! Just children. Always children. I hate myself. I hate the world. I’m poison.”   
  
The Doctor was silent for a moment. “Galifrey didn’t just burn, Jack,” he said suddenly. “I set it afire. Genocide of my own people. Every friend. Every lover. And every child. My own granddaughter. For the sake of the universe, that’s what I did.” There was a hesitation on the phone, and the Doctor’s voice was very small when he spoke again. “I know exactly how you feel, Jack. Why do you think I’m always so willing to die?”  
  
Jack closed his eyes. His own unsavory actions sounded mild in comparison. “How do you live with it?” he whispered.   
  
“You know me,” the Doctor said. “I run. I run and I run and I try never to look back.”   
  
“Run to what?”   
  
“Call it destiny,” the Doctor said with a smile in his voice. “You’re like me now, Jack. The universe will need you, and it will call you, and you won’t be able to say no. You’ll save tiny lives and entire planets and watch thousands burn around you. Just keep going. Don’t look back.”   
  
There was only one more thing to say. “Martha told me about the Face of Boe,” Jack said. “Is it possible?”   
  
“I don’t know,” the Doctor said. “But I will say one thing. There are only two beings I’ve ever seen who warp the spacetime around them, the only stillness in an ever changeable timestream. One is you. The other was him.”  
  
“Then how could he die?” Jack asked.  
  
“His aura was fainter,” the Doctor said. “More ancient. It didn’t hurt the eyes so. It finally wore out.” The Doctor chuckled. “Actually in the end, he blew it out. Himself. Like a candle flame. I told him to hold on, but he saw no need to. He said he’d seen too much. It was time for him to go. And he was right, though it grieved all of us who knew him.”   
  
Jack didn’t answer. He was remembering those huge deep eyes in that ancient face from a news report two thousand years into his own past. He wanted it to be true. He wanted it so much that he made himself believe it. From that moment, the Face of Boe was Jack’s version of religion. Instead of God and the promise of heaven, it was a distant promise of serenity and final death. He didn’t know. He just believed. Faith. Jack had never had faith in anything. He knew it would be shaken. He knew he would come to doubt it at times. But he gripped onto it and refused to let it go.   
  
Even the uncertain promise brought a small measure of peace. His horror of the future faded a little.   
  
“So what are you going to do?” the Doctor asked.   
  
“I don’t know yet,” Jack whispered.   
  
Then the Doctor said something Jack couldn’t believe. “Do you want me to come get you?”   
  
Jack closed his eyes. Of all the things he had ever wanted to hear anyone say... this was top of the list. The last time he had turned down the offer because of his team at Torchwood, and the first place he realized he truly belonged. He no longer belonged. But to his surprise, he didn’t jump up and say, Yes.   
  
“I still feel wrong to you, don’t I.”   
  
“It’s not so bad,” the Doctor said.   
  
“Don’t lie,” Jack said.   
  
The Doctor was silent for a moment. Finally, “It hurts,” the Doctor said. “But you’re like me, Jack. And you’re my responsibility. I’ll never forget that.”   
  
Jack shook his head, more to himself than to the Doctor, who couldn’t see it. “I think I should run on my own for a bit,” he said. “My heart’s a bit raw. I don’t think I could bear seeing it in your face.”  
  
“I can hide it,” the Doctor said, but they both knew he couldn’t. For all the times they had been together during the Year That Never Was, Jack had never gotten used to the way the Doctor would sometimes look away from him, shuddering. The Master had been much more blatant, describing exactly how wrong Jack looked. To the Doctor, watching Jack was like looking at a car accident, replete with the screaming, blood soaked bodies. And the Doctor blamed himself for it. Jack realized what the Doctor was offering was the equivalent of Jack offering to hang Stephen’s decaying corpse around his own neck for the next twenty years.   
  
“I don’t... want to hurt you,” Jack said. He’d hurt enough people. He was done with hurting people. “When you don’t have to hide it. When it doesn’t hurt. Come find me then.” He swallowed and said, “Please.”   
  
“All right, Jack,” the Doctor said. He hesitated and then said, “I’ve been where you are now,” he said. “You can come out of it. Rose brought me out of it.”  
  
“How?”   
  
“Selfishness and clarity,” the Doctor said. “The universe revolved around her. She shrank everything down to just herself. Even me. It bled away the pain, and I became only what she saw me as. When you can bear it... find someone to do that for you.”   
  
“Have you got someone?”   
  
The Doctor was silent for a moment. “Donna... Donna’s gone,” he said quietly.   
  
“I’m sorry,” Jack whispered. “You lose everyone, don’t you.” He was talking about himself more than the Doctor.   
  
“They come and go,” the Doctor whispered. “You make mistakes. You move on. Begin again.”  
  
“Is that what you do?”   
  
“I think I don’t have any choice,” the Doctor said quietly. “He will knock four times. I think... I think I still may not be... alone.”   
  
Jack shuddered again, thinking of what the Master had done. “Then I’m definitely running on my own. I don’t think I could face that again, just now.” The Doctor chuckled. “Just promise I’ll see you again,” Jack said.   
  
“That I will promise,” the Doctor said. “One day.”   
  
“Thank you, Doctor,” Jack said.   
  
“Thank you, Jack. Earth’s the only home I have left. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t been strong enough.” He hesitated. “I owe you.”   
  
The Doctor hung up. 


	5. Chapter 5

Jack sat for a long time on the edge of the bed. This hotel suite John had been holed up in was not homely, but it was very quiet. The sound of the Doctor’s voice echoed around in Jack’s head. He tried to memorize the conversation. He thought he might need it later.   
  
Unfortunately his reverie was broken. There were muffled thumps and groans outside in the sitting room of the suite. Jack ignored them for a moment, but Martha’s panicked voice finally dragged him back to awareness.  
  
“Don’t! Please!”  
  
Jack stood and threw open the door, still struggling with a pair of trousers. The tableau before him was pretty shocking. John, handcuffs still dangling from one wrist, had managed to get Martha face down on the floor, held in place by his knee. Mickey, meanwhile, was blooded, clearly dizzy, crouched on the floor, but alert enough to point a gun shakily at John’s head. John held a thin molecular needle at Martha’s throat. The harsh laser had already burned a thin line in the carpet, smoking with melted polyester.  
  
As Jack watched, John pulled a gun from Martha’s hand and pointed it at Mickey, who didn’t dare fire his own weapon with John’s lethal laser kissing Martha’s throat. Mickey wouldn’t back down. John cocked the gun.   
  
“We can’t just let you go,” Mickey spat.   
  
John stared him down. Jack strode forward and John fired at his movement. Martha screamed. Grim seconds passed. Finally Mickey opened his eyes to assess damage. The bullet had impacted on the wall a clear six inches beside his head.   
  
Jack knew for a fact that John’s aim was better than that.   
  
John groaned and threw the gun to the floor, rolling off Martha with a hopeless gesture. The molecular needle fell inactive to the ground.   
  
“I don’t know where he got it!” Martha gasped, rolling to her knees and grabbing the needle. “It was just there, in his hand. He’d cut through the cuffs like butter.”  
  
Mickey reached forward and grasped Martha’s wrist, and the two of them climbed slowly to their feet. John, however, stayed crumpled on the carpet, his knees folded up against his chest, his head hidden in his hands. Mickey picked up Martha’s gun and kicked John in the back, sending him toppling down onto the floor. He pointed the gun at John’s head. John just stared up at it, then closed his eyes, and turned his face away. “I could kill you for that!” Mickey growled. Blood dripped from his eyebrow onto his cheek.   
  
John only rolled back into a fetal position and covered his face with his hands.   
  
“Don’t,” Jack said, very quietly.   
  
Martha looked up at him.   
  
“He’s in a bad space,” Jack said.   
  
“He nearly killed my wife!” Mickey snapped.   
  
Jack laughed. “Trust me,” he said. “That was nowhere near nearly killed.”  
  
“Maybe not for you,” Mickey said. Clearly Martha had informed him of Jack’s eccentricities.   
  
“For John, he was treating you both with kid gloves,” Jack said. “In the position he was in he could have killed both of you, and dropped me like a deer, all in two seconds. You’d have been lucky to get a shot off, and certainly not a lethal one.”   
  
“What are you saying?” Mickey asked.   
  
“I’m saying, he just let you go,” Jack said. He knelt down by John’s head and touched it gently.   
  
“Get off me,” John groaned.   
  
Mickey was busy pulling out another set of handcuffs. He grabbed one of John’s hands and snapped the cuff around it.   
  
“What are you going to do with him?” Jack asked.   
  
“I still have some friends at UNIT,” Martha said. “We intend to deliver him to a secure facility, and make sure he can’t hurt anyone again.”   
  
Jack thought about the black hole of a prison UNIT had thrust Tosh in when he first found her.   
  
“Let him be,” Jack said.   
  
“We can’t do that, Jack,” Martha said gently. “You don’t know what he’s done.”   
  
“Yes I do,” Jack said. “Believe me, I do.”   
  
“Then you know he can’t be allowed to go free.”   
  
Jack took hold of Mickey’s wrist before he could grab for John’s other hand. Making sure to meet both Martha and Mickey’s eyes he said, “Leave him to me.”  
  
“Jack,” Martha began, “I don’t think—”   
  
“Hell, no!” Mickey said, and rubbed some of the blood off his cheek.   
  
Jack turned to Martha and just stared at her. “How’s Tish doing?” he suddenly asked.   
  
Martha looked taken aback. “She’s good. Better. Had a boyfriend for a bit.”  
  
“Didn’t work out?”   
  
“Hard to warm up to anyone,” Martha admitted.   
  
“Did she ever tell you about . . . Christmas day?”  
  
Martha cringed. Clearly, Tish had. It was a reference to the year that hadn’t happened — except to the unlucky few. As a Christmas present, the Master had made Tish slaughter Jack — not once, but twelve times, for the twelve days of Christmas. The Master had clearly found this hilarious. Tish had been a wreak for weeks.   
  
“He’s just been through worse,” Jack said. “Give him a break.”  
  
“We can’t let him go,” Mickey said darkly.   
  
“I didn’t say let him go,” Jack said. “I said leave him to me. I can personally guarantee he won’t hurt another earthly soul.”   
  
The argument didn’t end there, of course, but Jack persuaded Martha in the end, and she brought Mickey around. Finally, the husband and wife team left, both of them giving Jack a hug — Mickey’s stilted, and Martha’s lingering and heartfelt. John sat tiredly on the sofa and watched the proceedings, only making two or three snide comments. For John, this was extremely subdued.   
  
Finally, Jack closed the door of the suite and turned back to John.   
  
John had another gun held on him. Where did he keep them all? He must have had this one hidden in the sofa cushions. “Need another shot?” he asked.   
  
Jack rubbed his face and went up to him. Very slowly he put his hand on the gun. John’s hand was trembling. Jack took the gun away and set it on the coffee table. He turned back to find John staring at him darkly. “You’ve crippled me,” he said grimly. “I tried to do it. I did. I couldn’t.”   
  
“I know,” Jack said quietly.   
  
John closed his eyes. After a tense moment he whispered, “Oh, god, please hold me.”   
  
Jack wrapped his arms around John’s shoulders. John sighed with desperate relief and buried his nose in Jack’s neck, hugging himself tightly, as if he needed both his and Jack’s arms to keep himself held together. “Oh, you,” John whispered. “Between you and Grey I don’t know what’s left of me anymore.”   
  
Jack stroked his hair and let him melt against him. He felt John’s lips on his throat, and his hot, wet mouth, and closed his eyes. Why this? Why this, after everything? After all this time, all the torture and all the betrayal and all the death and all the disillusionment, how did it end up back here again, with John in his arms, as if nothing had ever changed. He might as well be young again, mortal again, three thousand years in the future, in the barracks of the Time Agency, waiting for another assignment. Except he was someone — someTHING — different, and he had done something that hurt John more than any sexual torture he had ever inflicted.   
  
John’s hands held his face, and pulled his lips down to his own. Jack let him kiss him, passively, without interest. Finally John stopped and stared up at him.   
  
Jack looked down. There was so much pain there in John’s eyes. “Please,” John whispered. “Please, let me.”  
  
“Do whatever you want,” Jack whispered, hopelessly.   
  
“I want,” John said, “to bring you back.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“I don’t want to fuck you,” John breathed. “I want you to want to be with me.”  
  
“I don’t love you, John,” Jack said. “Not anymore.”  
  
“I don’t give a shit!” John snapped, and Jack started, pulling away. “I don’t need you to love me! I want you to want something, anything, anything besides pain and death!” He touched Jack’s face. “Your face is etched in my mind, now. Still, staring, so very dead, twisted in pain. The first time I saw it last year I regretted it, killing you. Do you know what it did to me, regretting something? Grey had sent me to feel you out, the whole thing with the jewel and the explosive, it was all just to feel you out. I had the choice to kill you myself, or take you away with me. When I knew you wouldn’t go with me I pushed you off that roof, and I hated myself instantly. And now all I see is that death, these deaths, you, sprawled and pained and tortured, still and twisted — get me out of here!”   
  
Jack grabbed him tightly and held him still.   
  
John breathed in a few panicked breaths. Finally he laughed. “I could kill you for what you’ve done to me!” he said, a hysterical edge sharpening his voice. He pulled away and stared up at him. “Why’d you have to come to me?” he asked. “Why couldn’t you just have gone down to a train yard and thrown yourself in front of two dozen locomotives. You could have created an entire self-inflicted torture chamber and kept yourself half dead for months. Why’d you have to drag me into your hell?”   
  
John’s question had merit. Finally, Jack answered it. “I wanted someone to hurt as much as I do.”   
  
“And it had to be me?” John asked with pointed sarcasm.   
  
Jack’s memories of his life with John were misty, at best. They were several hundred — by now several thousand — years old, and they’d been blurred by memory blocks and drugs and alcohol and mental breakdowns. But they were coming clear as day, suddenly. The night John got drunk and told Jack about his massively abusive father, and what John had done to him one final night. The time John had nearly died from an infection he’d received pulling Jack from a poisonous jungle on Andelmor Prime. The time Jack nearly killed him when it became clear John had pulled them from a mission before they’d really had to abandon it, and seventy people had died. And of course, the sex. Tender caresses and rampant passion, gentle lovemaking followed by brutal rape. The two of them had run every possible thread of pleasure and pain, and by the end of those two weeks — five years — when they’d been trapped together, they knew each other by heart.  
  
John Hart.   
  
Jack didn’t let himself think about Ianto, or Stephen, or Gwen, or the degenerate selfishness of the human race, or the genocide he had committed against the 456. He didn’t let himself think about how much he hated himself or wanted to die. He didn’t let himself think at all. There was too much pain to think. He leaned forward and pressed his mouth against John’s, trying to capture those memories from so long ago that were swimming below the dark, damned memories of his last few months on Earth.   
  
John responded desperately, with a terrible sincerity that touched Jack’s heart — something he hadn’t thought possible. He gripped John’s lips with his teeth, and pressed himself so tightly against him that his neck ached, but the taste of him — the smell of him — 51st century pheremones — John so familiar in his arms, against his mouth, pulling on his flesh. The kiss broke — there was no way to keep anything that powerful up for long — but neither of them pulled away. For a long moment they hovered together, breathing in each other’s breath. Jack slowly opened his eyes to see John’s face, cyclops, too close, staring back at him. “Yes,” Jack breathed. “It had to be you.”   



	6. Chapter 6

You couldn’t recover innocence. Jack knew this as he let John pull him into the bedroom, kiss his way down his chest, unbutton his trousers. He couldn’t react, and John didn’t force the issue. He simply pushed him onto the bed.  
  
John was gentle and quite tender as he climbed over him. He kissed Jack’s neck, nuzzling the soft hairs behind his ear. Jack sighed, almost bored. John looked down. His haggard face looked disappointed, but not entirely surprised. “Just let me,” he said.   
  
Jack blinked at him, slowly. “I am.”  
  
“You’re not letting me in,” John said.  
  
Jack sighed and turned his face away. John kissed his cheek. “Tell me about him.”  
  
That did get Jack’s attention. “What?”  
  
“Tell me about him. Not how bad you feel, not about his death, about his life. Tell me what it was you loved.”  
  
“You wouldn’t understand it even if I did.”  
  
“Try me.”  
  
“No.”  
  
John looked about to say something, and then stopped. His mouth twitched. “I suppose he belongs to you,” he said.  
  
“No,” Jack said. “I just don’t want to give any part of him to you.” But even as he spoke those harsh words, Jack’s hands reached up and held John’s shoulders, holding him close for a moment before he let them fall again to the bed.  
  
John looked down at him. “You can turn me into him, if you want,” he said. “Close your eyes and imagine anything.”  
  
Jack actually smiled. John with his hubris was admitting that Jack might want someone else. “It wouldn’t work even if I tried,” he said.  
  
John shrugged. “I know. But I thought I’d offer.” He kissed Jack’s cheek again. Then his jaw. Then began working his teeth gently around Jack’s throat again. Jack closed his eyes, and wondered if he’d ever feel anything again. John’s mouth whispered against Jack’s ear. “You’ve forgotten, haven’t you.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Us.”  
  
Jack shook his head. “It was pretty long ago.”  
  
John pulled away. “Not really.”  
  
Jack blinked at him with eyes thousands of years old. “You know how long it was.”   
  
“No, I mean... I don’t mean time,” John said. “I don’t mean age, or how many years have passed between then and now for either of us.” He traced his fingers along Jack’s jaw. “I remember you,” he said. “I remember you young and stupid and naive. Always out for yourself. I remember... all the things I had to teach you to make you into my lover.” He stared into Jack’s eyes. “I remember when you turned it all back on me. I remember when you had me crawling at your feet because I loved you so much.” He shook his head. “No one had ever done that to me. No one ever will again. I wouldn’t let them.” He frowned. “And now you won’t let me.”   
  
“John, this isn’t—”  
  
John wouldn’t let him finish. With a sudden and angry blow he hit Jack in the face. “I don’t want you!” John hissed at him.  
  
Jack tried to sit up, tried to hit him back, but he was weak from so many deaths, and John was not going to let him go.   
  
“I don’t want this poisoned, death soaked monster who has stolen my lover! Let go!”  
  
“What?” Jack was confused now.  
  
John hit him again, and again, and Jack moaned with the pain. It felt... good. John’s rage was almost better than death. “Let him go!” John roared at him. “I know you’re in there, Shane! Merick, Anton, it’s me!” Jack shuddered as different names he’d gone by in his years in the Time Agency fluttered over him. “Jay! Jay! Where are you? Where is the face of Boe?”   
  
Jack grunted as if the name was another blow. He didn’t know how John had done it. He’d taken him down, back and back with old, abandoned names, dragged him progressively deeper into his memories, literally beaten the names into him. And there he was. Deep in his subconscious, almost forgotten, young and naive and dangerous in his ignorance.   
  
No, you can’t recover innocence. But you can dredge up the past, and it was that which suddenly reached up and kissed John full on the mouth, raging through Jack’s body until he broke out in a sweat. Every muscle clenched, and he went hard against John. John finally relaxed, let Jack kiss him for a moment, and then pushed him violently down and took his cock deep into his throat.   
  
Jack gasped, his body arching up, thrusting mindlessly into the sensation. And he couldn't take it.  
  
He didn't want it.  
  
There was a part of him, suddenly, that was looking on, detached and soulless, watching the body on the bed as it was molded and sucked by John’s expert attentions. ‘Why am I doing this?’ it thought. ‘What good will it do? What does it matter?’ It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Not even what was happening to him now.  
  
“Pretty good at that, isn’t he,” said Ianto.  
  
If Jack hadn’t been disembodied and empty, he would have reacted differently. As it was, it seemed as if Ianto had always been there. “He always was,” he said. “It was his best quality, really.”  
  
“You don’t seem to be enjoying it.”   
  
The body on the bed moaned and then screamed, clutching onto John’s hair as his ministrations reached their desired goal.   
  
“Looks like I am.”  
  
“Looks are deceiving.” Ianto looked over at him. “Why aren’t you in there enjoying that?”  
  
“Is there a reason I should be?”  
  
“Is there any reason you shouldn’t?”   
  
Jack looked away from the tableau on the bed, as John tried to find his breath, and Jack still trembled and sweated, panting. There was Ianto, still Ianto, smiling his seductive smile, suit and tie, all glimmering efficiency. “There’s nothing I want there.”   
  
Ianto did not look convinced. “That’s all you’ve ever wanted.”  
  
“Is that what you think?” Jack said. “After everything, you think it was just physical?”  
  
“No,” Ianto said. He pointed with his chin at the figures on the bed. Jack had let himself be turned over, and John was behind him, forcing himself inside, his face a mask of perfect relief. “But that, that there, was what you lived for. Saving lives and making love.”   
  
“That is not making love.”   
  
“It is for him,” Ianto said, looking at John’s exquisitely tortured face. “All those people you’ve loved. I was one of them. Wasn’t I.”  
  
“I won’t forget you. I promise. He means nothing. No one does.”  
  
Ianto looked troubled. “But that wasn’t what I meant,” he said. “When I said I didn't want you to forget me, I didn't want this. I don’t want my death to be turned into nothing.”   
  
“What?”  
  
Ianto stared at him. “I didn’t die to hurt you. I never wanted my memory to torture you. What a waste!”  
  
Jack’s disembodied self stepped toward him, but Ianto was no closer — and no further away. “I only ever wanted to make you happy,” Ianto said. “Even when I hated you I still wanted to make you happy. Probably because I loved you even then. What have you done, cyber-converted me or something?”  
  
Jack looked back at the two on the bed. Jack’s head was down, and his face seemed twisted in blissful agony, but he still felt no desire to go back into that body.  
  
“It was never Lisa’s life that tortured me. It was what had been done to her. You’ve turned me into something that can only hurt you. Really, Jack. What have you done to me?”  
  
Jack turned back and reached out to Ianto. “I miss you!” The silent words were a desperate whisper.   
  
Ianto only smiled. “I love you,” he said quietly. And then, without feeling it, Jack was turned. His bodiless form was pushed, very gently, back into his body. “Take it,” Ianto said to him as he went. “Accept it. Take it, for me.”  
  
And Jack was inside himself, and John was deep in him, pushing against him, glorious slides of his cock drawing heat through his whole body. Oh, fuck, did he love having a body! John’s hands were on his ribs, holding him tight enough almost to bruise, and the sounds he was making — deep masculine grunts like a desperate animal. Jack’s cock was hard and straining, and he could feel a tiny droplet of fluid just leaking from the tip. He pushed back against John, and he could feel his balls twisted against him. The scent of him, the feel of him, the heat of him, made Jack shudder with sudden longing.  
  
“Please!” he found himself muttering. “Please!”   
  
“I will fuck you till you come,” John whispered from behind him. “And then I’ll do it again. And I will fuck you and fuck you until you can’t take any more. And then I’ll fuck you one more time, just for me.”   
  
Jack laughed. That was so John! He arched up off his hands, pressing his back against John’s chest, the sweat and the skin melding together. John bit his shoulder hard — very hard — and the pain coursed through him like a drug. He groaned with pleasure and pushed back against John, wiggling his ass like a happy puppy.  
  
John couldn’t take it. He cried out, and both hands wrapped around Jack, grabbing at his cock, squeezing it so hard he could have pulled it off, and it was like that that Jack came, semen squeezed forcibly from him, no finesse, no sympathy.  
  
John pulled away from him, but Jack was having none of that. This was HIS, HIS, and he was going to take it. His balls ached deliciously, but the rest of his body was still hungry, still starving for pleasure after so much pain and misery. Jack wrapped himself around John, feeling the heat of his skin, the scent of his body. “Oh, yeah,” Jack breathed. He kissed John’s throat and shoulders, rediscovered his complacent mouth, scratched his fingernails down his skin. He pressed him down into the bed, and John let him, blissfully let him, let him explore and reacquaint himself with every inch of his exhausted body.  
  
And when Jack seemed to tire of this, John rolled over and took him again, gently and with such tenderness that Jack could only let it wash over him like the tide.  
  
It had been a long time since the two of them had made love. Long on one hand, longer on the other, but they still remembered how.   
  
And if it wasn’t love, what did it matter? John wanted it. Jack needed it, and needed it badly. Whatever it was, it would do for tonight. 


	7. Chapter 7

  
What happened next was silence and stillness as John passed out from exhaustion and Jack lay still, gathering his thoughts. He didn’t try to sleep. Ianto used to help him sleep. He wondered how long it would be before he loved someone enough to risk sleeping. A thousand years? Maybe he’d even forget how in that time.   
  
John Hart. Martha Jones. The Doctor. The Face of Boe. There were things to live for... which was good. Because he didn’t have any choice in the matter.   
  
Not yet.   
  
Jack tried to feel the energy in his body, that spark which always restarted his body, rebuilt it, made him live. Sometimes, he could find it. The demon Abaddon had pulled it from him in a glittering cloud. If what the Doctor and Martha Jones said was true, one day he would have the ability to turn it off, blow it out, end it for good and all.   
  
He couldn’t feel it right now. He’d try to learn where to find it, and then learn how to grasp it. If he could do that...   
  
Life was complicated enough. He still had to figure out what to do with John.   
  
  
***  
  
  
When John woke, he was pleased to feel Jack’s warm body pressed comfortingly against him. He sighed and snuggled. Jack was fully dressed, though. John guessed he hadn’t slept. He knew what it meant. His heart sank, but he drew up a smile. “So, lover,” he murmured. “You and me, back on the back of the universe again.” He caressed Jack’s wrist strap with one finger. “Any plans on where we go from here?”   
  
“Our separate ways,” Jack said. He said it almost apologetically.  
  
John tried not to be crushed at disappointment at those words, even though he’d been half expecting them. “Oh, come on, Jackie,” he murmured. He scratched his nails down Jack’s chest. “We just don’t work without each other.”   
  
“That may be true for you. But as you so eloquently pointed out, I’m not the same person I was.”   
  
John sighed.   
  
“And you can’t stay here,” Jack said. “You know that.”   
  
“What are you on about?” John asked. “I like Earth.”   
  
“So do I. Which is why you can’t stay here.” He took hold of John’s neck and kissed him. John moaned with contentment, but Jack released him all too quickly. “I’m not going to leave this planet at the hands of a fifty-first century sociopath.”   
  
“You make that sound like a bad thing,” John said petulantly.   
  
“John. Go home.”   
  
John looked away. “I don’t have one,” he said. He stared into space. “Home was you. For a while, home was Grey.” He chuckled painfully. “That was a relationship that turned real sour.” He shook his head. “I’ve been waiting around here for you to come to your senses.” He looked up at Jack. “I thought... maybe you had...?”  
  
Jack looked down at John’s pleading eyes. “I loved you, once,” Jack said. “And buried under all these years, I’m sure there’s part of me that still does. But we both know I can’t trust you. And my job is to eliminate alien or extra-temporal threats to Earth. And you know what you are.”   
  
“What do you think I’m going to do?”   
  
“Leave,” Jack said.   
  
“I’d rather die.”   
  
“I can do that for you,” Jack said, and he said it without threat, and without jest. He kissed John very tenderly, and whispered his next words against John’s temple. “I can execute you now, if you’d like. I’d be very gentle.”  
  
“You’re serious,” John whispered. Jack pulled away and stared at him. Stared at him with eyes two thousand years old and saturated with pain. Eyes that couldn’t die. At Jack’s hands, death would be a gift — a gift right from the heart. “I’ll go,” John said. “I just wish I could be with you. I don’t actually know what to do with myself.”   
  
“Actually... I don’t either. At the moment. But I think I might know of somewhere... someone you could go to.”   
  
“Who?” John said, annoyed. “Back to Ms. Jones and her hard-muscled hubby?”   
  
“No,” Jack said. “I have coordinates all punched into your strap. It’ll take a few hops, but you’ll get there.”   
  
John looked at the co-ordinates. “New Earth, year five billion?” he said incredulously. “What’s there?”   
  
“Get dressed,” Jack said. “If you’re really good, I’ll let you fuck me one more time before you go.”   
  
John jumped up and slid his clothes on in a trice. A moment later half of them had to come off, but after that he was too tired to protest as Jack buttoned them back on. John wrapped his arms around Jack’s shoulders and smiled at him. “You are the most dangerous man in the universe,” John said. “You’ve gone and made me into a better person! I’m disgusted.”   
  
“Someone did that to me, once,” Jack said. “It hurts. It can darn near kill you.” He kissed John again and then put him carefully away.   
  
“I take it if I don’t go, I’m Smith-Jones fodder again?”  
  
“Or I could take care of you, if you’d rather.”   
  
“You mean execute me.”   
  
Jack said nothing.   
  
“I’ll leave,” John said with a sigh. He looked at the co-ordinates on his strap again. “So what’s in the year five-billion?”   
  
“On New Earth, I want you to find someone. I’m sure by then he’ll have figured out what to do with you.”   
  
“Who?”   
  
Jack smirked. “He’s called the Face of Boe,” he said.   
  
John was still staring at him in disbelief when Jack pressed the button on his strap and sent him on his way.   
  
  
***  
  
  
Jack looked down at his own wrist strap and wished it were that easy for him. He could have gone with John, of course. But... it didn’t seem right. The Doctor had broken his own wrist strap for a reason. It had other purposes. He looked it up and located an alien transport passing within range of Earth. It would be there within a few weeks. Just time enough to close out all of his affairs... and tell Gwen. She should know he was leaving.   
  
The children of earth were safe. That was something to live for. There was an end to the endless tunnel. That was something to live for. Jack... was not happy. He wouldn’t be. He couldn’t be. But the Doctor learned to move on despite all of his heinous acts... and Jack could too. He just couldn’t do it here.   
  
So he’d run. He’d learned it from the best. Run and run and never look back. Save just one person, help just one planet, and never look back. Don’t forget... oh, Ianto... don’t ever forget. But move on.   
  
It was time for Jack to move on.


End file.
